SDPD investigates online murder confession

Did you hear the one about the guy from San Diego who told the Internet he killed his sister's abusive boyfriend with his own drugs while he was unconscious and "they ruled it as an overdose"?

No, San Diego Police don't find the joke funny, either. If a joke is what it was.

Lt. Kevin Mayer said word of last weekend's online confession via a popular Internet bear meme on the social-media site Reddit came to the department Thursday morning. "It was turned over to our Homicide unit for follow-up," Mayer said. "Our Cold Case/Missing Person team is looking into it."

Websites like dailydot.com, gawker.com and laweekly.com were abuzz this week with word that a bear meme bearing the bizarre confession was the work of a Southern California Reddit user named "Naratto." Thursday members of Reddit and other amateur Internet detectives helped identify the man as 24-year-old with ties to San Diego named Colton "Colt" Goodbrand, using a trail of personal information he had left online.

Late Saturday night, a user named Naratto posted a thread to Reddit's meme-loving AdviceAnimals subforum. "Finally have the guts to say it," read the thread title, which linked to a version of a popular image macro meme known as Confession Bear.

Many uses of Confession Bear are mild and often quite obviously false. This one, however, instantly divided the forum.

Was the thread-starter aiming for karma? Or had he just made the second-biggest mistake of his life?

Within moments, other Reddit users (or Redditors) had undertaken a form of Internet justice and scared up and shared much of Naratto's personal information on the social media site. "Everything from name, DOB, jobs, location, FB, Twitter, Myspace, the whole deal," one Redditor said.

The information was subsequently deleted, along with Naratto's account, which featured among other things, mention of the man's favorite sandwich (from Mama's Grill in Clairemont). But before that happened, someone forwarded the information to the F.B.I., and the San Diego police also got involved.

Gawker got involved, too, tying Naratto's information to Goodbrand using multiple methods of publicly-available data and sharing their sleuthing in a post headlined, "Is This the Redditor Who Claimed to Have Murdered His Sister’s Abusive Ex?"

When others on Reddit began unearthing and sharing his personal information, the man identified then only as Naratto set out to explain the post that had sparked so much interest. He wrote: "I posted this wondering what would happen, there is SOME truth behind it, but I'm not saying what was true and what wasn't. If I had a dollar for every time someone took me seriously on the internet, I would be able to retire from today alone."

Perhaps. But it was a murder that the Internet was talking about. And that's why it became so serious so quickly. That and the fact that even in a followup post Naratto didn't acknowledge the whole thing was a joke.

The Reddit community was divided. Many found humor in the whole thing, but others thought it went too far.

One Reddit user wrote: "The funny thing is that if he gets caught they'll use confession bear as evidence."

Wrote another: "That moment when a lawyer introduces Exhibit A, known to the internet community as 'Confession Bear'...lolz."

(Lolz, for those who don't live on the Internet, means repeated laughing out loud, or LOL.)

Still another Redditor wrote: "I honestly hope you end up getting questioned by cops if only to serve as a lesson to others when it comes to posting s--- like this. That and I feel like you were serious and are now just trying to cover your tracks. Either way, I saw all of your personal info posted earlier so people definitely know who you are."